Alabama Senate special election thread of hot takes, bitter disappointment, and/or slightly possible exuberance.

Oh hi gerrymandering!

Didn’t realize how bad it was in Alabama. Because it’s Alabama and I never really think about them.

That’s probably the biggest failure of the democratic party in the past decade… they didn’t really dedicate any efforts to local elections, and lost control of state houses… which led to what we see now in terms of gerrymandering… which then led to the GOP becoming hyper nutso.

Yes, that’s exactly what happened.

I’s pretty amazing to go back and look at the chain of events here:

  • Trump appoints a sitting senator to attorney general, forcing a special election
  • Alabama governor appoints Luther Strange to fill the vacancy amid a stink of corruption
  • The new Alabama governor schedules a special election, versus just waiting for the 2018 cycle as originally planned
  • Luther Strange loses the primary to an insane bigot
  • The insane bigot is also a child molester

It all goes back to Trump and his Sessions pick. Thanks Trump! If the D’s manage to take back the senate by 1 seat in 2018? Glorious.

You forgot to add that Trump is now wanting to fire that AG.

A thousand times this. “Disaffected African-American Dems” was this year’s “economic anxiety.” People at the time cited stats to disprove it; people a year from now will publish studies disproving it. Yet the media will keep on doing stories about anecdata. Nothing on earth can convince them that stats from numbers geeks can outweigh a reporter scouring a local diner for three people who share his prior beliefs about what the story ought to be.

@Triggercut didn’t bully me last night, so I’ll have to pick on myself. I just want to say that I’ve never been so happy to be so wrong. I’m still shocked that Alabama elected a Democrat, even given the candidate the GOP ran.

Alabama CD 6 sorta looks like Wall-E.

SO MUCH WINNING

Great summary. Someone on twitter posted these like a “Choose-your-own-adventure” story, where multiple times, Trump and the Republicans made the absolute worst choice possible.

But it starts with Sessions. That no one on Team Trump realized that they were going to have a Roy Moore problem if they removed one of the state’s longtime sitting senators seems like a huge gaffe, created by understaffing and putting people into roles they weren’t qualified to have.

Pennsylvania 18 should be a super-easy hold for the GOP…but…

Pennsyltucky is a weird place. Pretty Trumpy country.

In the mid 90s, I stopped at a turnpike stop in the middle of nowhere and couldn’t find any Snapple. I asked one of the people who worked there about it, and I got the blankest of stares. They’d never heard of Snapple.

Fucking Pennsyltucky.

Tell me about it! The York County area where I am from is really Conservative.

Yep. Should be an easy hold.

But this is the district to replace Tim Murphy, who resigned earlier this year after being caught suggesting a woman – not his wife – get an abortion to deal with a pregnancy apparently involving the pro-life congressman.

Are you comparing typical turnout in a general election to that in a special election? Because the latter will almost always be lower, regardless of who is running.

You can say two things about this special election. First, voter turnout was overall lower than in the last general election. This is no surprise. Second, the drop in black turnout was less than the drop in white turnout.

But I’m not sure if it’s possible to conclude whether this was due to especially motivated black voters, discouraged white voters, or both.

Sonky and I are 2 of the votes in Shelby County, the county in the middle right below Birmingham. It’s the hot pink one that went to Trump by a lot. I voted Democrat yesterday. I voted Democrat in 2016. With a few exceptions in my experimental youth, I’ve always voted Democrat or Independent.

You know, I was going to write this big thing about how it’s disheartening to those of us who do try here to get the constant “great job not electing a pedophile, morons,” but who am I preaching to?

I’m just glad we won. Roll Tide I guess.

So am I. In the end, that you’re happy this result came about – and largely came about because a whole lot of white voters in Shelby voted for Doug Jones or didn’t go to the polls at all – is all that matters.

Nice work. Apologize for nothing.

So with many pundits and media crediting the minority turnout for swinging the tide in the Alabama race, what are the odds Trump and the GOP start working on some sort of horrific voter suppression legislation targeting minorities? I could totally see them proposing that anyone participating in certain State or Federal assistance programs should not be allowed to participate in elections until they “come off the public dole”. That would spin perfectly with their racist and “economically anxious” supporters.

Also, well done Alabama, well done. I’m cautiously optimistic that this new wave of blue sentiment and support will carry us into a game-changing 2018, then on to 2020. Fingers crossed that all these Democratic candidates actually recognize what it is that ushered them into their seats and work hard to represent the actual interests of ALL the people they represent.

What do you mean what are the odds? They are 100%. This is what Kris Kobach is working on. It will be rolled out next year.